​Airports have a way of wearing out, of becoming prematurely bedraggled, haggard, and out-of-date. They are tired, tiring, and tiresome places where the architecture never makes the moment of arrival or departure grand or inviting. Dismal is the norm.

​​John F. Kennedy International Airport is no exception. First called Idlewild, it grew by accretion, adding privately held airline terminal buildings one after another, until the entire place was a mass of short circuits. Nothing connected, and with the exception of Eero Saarinen’s swooping TWA Terminal, nothing made the experience of flying a thrill. Delano and Aldrich’s original 1945 master plan had envisioned a single, shared terminal––an idea abandoned because neither the air carriers nor the bookkeepers liked it. By the mid-1980s, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which ran the airport, was again interested in the idea.

This is the last in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

​In 1967, Paul Rudolph was asked by the Ford Foundation to reimagine Robert Moses’s maligned but not yet dead Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), a Y-shaped link that would have connected the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges to each other and to the Holland Tunnel. Opponents, led by activist and author Jane Jacobs, eventually killed the project (it was scrapped officially in 1971), saying that, in the name of urban renewal, it would eviscerate the neighborhood and ransack its residents.

This is the sixth in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

Photo in "The New York Rapid Transit Railway Extensions," Engineering News, 1914

By Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin

The name Daniel Lawrence Turner means nothing to New Yorkers. But save for poor timing, he was almost the mastermind behind the most far-reaching subway plan ever proposed for New York City.

​Turner, chief engineer of the city’s Transit Construction Commission, was concerned by the alarming increase in traffic on the city’s street railways and trolleys, which, according to his estimates, had “nearly doubled every ten years.” Realizing the “necessity of an orderly development of rapid transit lines in all sections of the City,” and wanting to get ahead of development rather than follow it, in 1920 he submitted the “Report By The Chief Engineer Submitting For Consideration a Comprehensive Rapid Transit Plan Covering all Boroughs of the City of New York.”

This is the third in a series of posts drawn from the authors'recent work ​Never Built New York, published courtesy of Metropolis Books.

​International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 TrainBy Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum Columbia University Press (April 2017)​312 pages

Reviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis

​This summer has been a hard one for the MTA. In early June, a nursing student on his way to graduation, dressed in his cap and gown, missed the ceremony due to train delays that made him three hours late. Sympathetic (and similarly delayed) fellow passengers threw him an impromptu graduation, with one person pulling up a picture of a diploma to present to him on a cell phone. Another played classic graduation jam “Good Riddance” by Green Day on a speaker, while the other passengers looked on, smiling.

​The following week, in an incident less heartwarming but more disturbing, an F train lost power while underground, trapping passengers for 45 minutes underground with no lights or air conditioning. With elderly and pregnant passengers forced to endure temperatures climbing above 100 degrees, and all the smells of a packed rush hour train, tensions and tempers flared. To add insult to injury, even as the train finally made it to the station, riders were forced to wait another ten minutes for the packed subway platform to clear before they were released, while onlookers took iPhone photos of their misery through the train’s steamed-up windows. At the end of the month, New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the struggling MTA.

In today’s world, the basic right to equal public transportation is a given, but that wasn’t always the case. One hundred and sixty years ago, one of the most important civil rights battles took place on the streets of New York — ​​and hardly anyone remembers it.

It was 30 years ago, almost to the day, that a new subway map was brought into play. It was a quasi-geographic map, the product of a committee at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that I chaired for the bulk of its existence. The map reflected the notion that the official New York City subway map should not show the city in a void but should reflect the city it serves.